Working with the Ajabus, a significant BPP chapter has been set up in Indianapolis. Its degree of organization and activity rivals your own, and they have already started planning armed marches and public pressure campaigns. What's more, the success of both chapters has inspired the Black community of Dallas to follow your lead, with local radio personality Aaron Michaels pledging himself to the revolutionary struggle. Most importantly, McGee has started more in-depth discussions with the members of all three chapters, inviting them to a national "Black Power Summit" to be held next year. This would also be the perfect opportunity to commit yourself to a formal united organization, though this comes with its own challenges regarding strategy and leadership.
(Critical Success! Indianapolis and Dallas chapters founded. Black Power Summit planned for 1993)
Closer to home, the community aid efforts have received the brunt of your attention. This has helped to extend much further than you'd initially intended; beyond working with local mosques and churches to set up food kitchens, you've also been stocking several pantries with food and toiletries, and organized a kind of 'meals on wheels' service for the elderly and the disabled. To keep any of these initiatives from devolving into mere charity, you make sure to emphasize their communal aspect, treating them as an opportunity to build local ties and discuss local grievances. There's also an educational aspect to them; not only are your most knowledgeable members on hand to guide impromptu discussions, but you've also equipped the kitchens and pantries with a healthy supply of revolutionary literature, to be taken out as part of an informal library network. Overall, the basis of your community work is solid. Now to push further.
(Double Success! Local Mutual Aid established, with many opportunities for expansion)
Given the eccentric nature of your members, it makes sense that the focus of your reading group would be equally bizarre. You're all about the thrill of reading weird, transformative theory, even if some of it is outright impenetrable.
For the initial readings, you try to avoid the heavy duty French guys like Debord and Deleuze, and instead focus on secondary sources like Sadie Plant's new book on Situationism. The point of that, in turn, is to get acquainted with the origins of all this cool "cyborg theory", as set out by people like Donna Haraway or the VNS Matrix collective.
Not everyone is on board with this strong feminist focus, though; most of you are still guys who study at MIT. And so, the reading group soon spreads its attention across three broad areas.
Besides the cyberfeminist stuff, the other two are aimed at investigating the political potential of the burgeoning internet. One answer to this is more about the technology and organization, and so quickly settles on reading the classics of cybernetics, or systems science. Even if the Soviets couldn't build an economy using computers, the Chileans seemingly got a lot closer.
The other approach, then, is social and cultural in orientation. The true strength of the internet is that it makes the sharing of information almost free and frictionless. Could that be the beginning of a kind of 'open source society'? To even comprehend the ethics of such a radically altered society, you're going back to the great anarchist theorists like Benjamin Tucker and Peter Kropotkin, people who seemed to share your love of free association.
What you have so far lacked in focus, you are making up for in enthusiasm. And now that you know what you're interested in, perhaps you can try writing some of this stuff yourself.
(KLC Reading Group established. Minor interest generated; you are now a third of the way towards Size Level 2)
(Guest update by
@silverpower )
Setting up a website, ftpd and mail bouncer turns out to be pretty trivial. Simply write a bombastic and spooky manifesto with help from your friends in 21/24, format it in the new SGML format that Tim Berners-Lee made, drop it in the right folder, and you're done. Then run "httpd ~/httpd.conf && ftpd ~/ftpd.conf && listserv ~/listserv.cfg &" in your sysadmin friend's account and leave the terminal session up. Congratulations, the Knights of the Lambda Calculus now has a presence on the information superhighway.
This lasts for two hours and thirteen minutes, when your terminal session times out from a broken pipe. Heading to the lab in your dorm only confirms your fear - somebody restarted that workstation. This happens every time somebody decides to hog a terminal for running their fluid dynamics sim or whatever; what made you think you were immune? After several more tries go about as smoothly, the Knights resolve to get their own computer.
Unfortunately, few if any of the computers you own are suitable. Some do run Unix, but not in a way that helps you. One bright spark tries running Xenix on his personal 386, but quickly finds that NCSA wasn't joking about "you must have a working ANSI C compiler", something that Microsoft and later Santa Cruz Operation never quite figured out until recently. Supposedly SCO Open Desktop will have everything you need when 2.0 drops, for a mere $2495 for the Server edition. BSDi sends out two closed betas then gets sued by USL. Fortunately, both Linux and 386BSD (which has been promised for a year now in Dr. Dobb's Journal) are coming along nicely.
Ultimately, over the summer, several of the Knights manage to assemble a 386 clone system and install 386BSD 0.1 with some of the patchkits, and connect it to Internet. In the future, this will likely be the earliest open post-4.4 BSD system on Internet, but for now you're just glad it's done, even if it's just hosting a bunch of manifestos, reading group notes and a FAQ page about 386BSD on the WWW. This isn't a forever solution, since it relies on people keeping it connected in their dorm room, but it'll suffice until your reading group manages to find hosting elsewhere.
(The KLC is now on the World Wide Web; you will accumulate popularity over time)
The expansion of the Summer School has had mixed results. While many local students seemed enthusiastic about your new history courses, you ultimately had few signups, with even your normal courses still just coasting along on their established audience. While you believe they will ultimately prove a valuable part of the curriculum, especially as you gain experience in teaching them, the effort spent on them this year has partly gone to waste, and has distracted from any thought of 'virtual' education. Anything like that's been left to the people working on our general online efforts.
(ISE curriculum expanded)
And to your surprise, the online team actually does really well. As more and more people get access to the internet, through whatever networks and ISPs they may be using, the audience grows steadily less niche. That said, the nerds and activists who currently populate the BBS forums, IRC chats, and mailing lists of the Net are already fairly sympathetic to your message. As such, you use these discussion spaces to spark a specific interest in Social Ecology as a doctrine, offering to mail out books and course materials to whomever wants to learn more about it. You also do a bit of online pamphleteering by fax, though this nets you a pretty high telephone bill after a while. Some of the techies on your team have also started to hear whispers about this cool new network called the World Wide Web. Maybe that's worth looking into?
(Major Success! The ISE has gained a bit of online popularity, expanding your range of influence. You can also try to build a website now)
While Murray has by no means given up on libertarian municipalism, the recent disappointment that was the Burlington Greens has led him to refocus. He feels like he should return to the well of leftist history, and see if there are any past forms or strategies that he has yet overlooked. And while Anarchist Catalonia is an enduring object of interest in this context, there are perhaps other histories which even Bookchin has overlooked. But what would they be?
(Made a moderate degree of progress on Bookchin's next publication) (30% complete)
The attempt to provide physical security at queer events provokes a storm of misinformation in local media. Before long, rumors of "f*ggots with assault rifles" fill the pages of every conservative outlet. (The rumors aren't true, obviously: the worst weapons you actually carry are baseball bats.) As the local far-right skinheads come looking for a fight, and police repression grows heavier than usual, you are forced to actually cancel several meetups. Your ongoing "Nights Out" campaign has also been put on hold. In spite of these setbacks, your urge to 'bash back' has only grown stronger.
(Major failure. "Nights Out" removed)
After a rough start consisting of several tense conversations, you begin to pull some of your comrades in the RCP out of their cultish stupor. You attack their complacent radicalism from two angles; first, by appealing to the friendship that was broken upon your departure from Avakian's clique, and secondly, by pointing out how little their outfit has gotten done over the years. In doing so, you are forced to come to grips with the insularity of the communist subculture. For too long, you have treated everyone else in your milieu as a potential or actual counterrevolutionary. In that regard, Chairman Bob's ranting about cultural degeneracy was just the tip of an intolerant iceberg.
In order to get anything done in the world, you argue to your erstwhile comrades, you must be willing to bear the deviations of the masses. From a pedagogical perspective, the mass line can't just be an excuse to lecture the oppressed on what Marx or Mao prescribed. Instead, it must become a collective, co-creative critique, where the grievances of the many are refined and directed. But to even begin this work, the party organization should be an open and welcoming place. And Avakian has alienated far too many people for the RCP to be a viable organization. Thus, there is the New October Movement.
Your pitch proves surprisingly effective, at least with those who don't avoid you immediately. Thanks to your efforts, a few dozen more people have quit the RCP, and some are even moving to the Pacific Northwest in order to join the NOM. With the base membership secured, you can now move on to greater initiatives.
(RCP recruitment successful. The NOM is now halfway to Size Level 2)
